


quia peccavi nimis (my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault)

by Draco_sollicitus



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Brief Smut, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Graphic Depictions of Torture, Immortal Husbands, Joe finds him, Kidnapping, M/M, Nicky is kidnapped again, Post-Movie, switching POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:47:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: After Merrick, Nicky takes Joe back to Malta. They distract each other from the pain of almost losing each otheragainbut it seems that trouble isn't too far off.Merrick had competitors, after all. And when data gets into the wrong hands as a result of corporate espionage, others come for Nicky and Joe. They only need one of them, and it's an easy choice for Nicky -- he just prays that Joe will some day forgive him.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 233
Kudos: 1750





	1. What I Have Done

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO
> 
> This is my first Joe/Nicky fic. I've been obsessed with these two since I saw The Old Guard last week, and I really hope I do their pairing justice with this heap of angst and violence (with a small amount of smut at the start as a treat before the pain begins!). I didn't read the comics, as a disclaimer!
> 
>  _Note_ Title comes from the Confiteor, which is said as part of the penitential rite in Catholic mass (I'm just saying, as a bi Catholic Italian, Nicky ... yeah, I like Nicky)
> 
>  **Potential Warnings**  
>  Car crash  
> Eventual torture  
> Blood  
> Broken bones
> 
> (Gratuitous Catholic references)

They go back to Malta.

It seems only right; Nile, sweet Nile who Nicky already loves so much, disappears into the world with Andy, the oldest and the newest of them striking out to find dark corners and secrets. Joe gets tense when Andy says she’s leaving, but Nile swears solemnly to protect her with her life - “all of the ones I can give,” she jokes, “so I’ll be going for a while” -- and Nicky likes to think he finds a way to distract his beloved.

Malta.

They don’t move from bed for a week, and he’s sure the locals whisper about the men who only emerge to collect food from their doorstep. Nicky doesn’t care. They’ve been dragged apart before, violently and otherwise, by whispers and rumors, but here a millenia away from the gates of Jerusalem, they’re less likely to be killed for loving each other.

(It still happens, of course. Nicky’s personally killed those who’d harmed men and women like him and Joe. He’d felt no remorse for those deaths -- homophobia is, as his beloved would say, infantile. He will not let it fester where he can stop it.)

They spend the first week in bed, and Nicky comes on Joe’s cock more times than he can count, gets Joe to come on his cock, too, and they’re a mess, sticky and sweaty and laughing as they whisper endearments into collarbones and kiss away bruises and cuts that had healed weeks ago.

“I would burn them all,” Joe admits once as he rocks his hips shallowly into Nicky from behind; his tongue laves at Nicky’s earlobe, and he moans weakly in response. “I’d burn down the world for you, my love, my eternal, my-”

“You talk too much,” Nicky gasps, resting his head backwards onto Joe’s shoulder. “I’m clearly not doing my job”

Joe shushes him before bringing his lips to the tender skin that connects neck to shoulder, his lips and then his teeth which draws a keen from Nicky’s throat; his hand loosely fists around Nicky’s cock, and he comes with a shout that’s more whisper than noise. “Beautiful,” Joe praises, “Carino.”

He’s always close behind Nicky after he finishes. Says the way he trembles for him, fucked open and hazy-eyed, makes him hot all over. Nicky doesn’t mind; he loves the feeling of him coming undone inside him, on him. He’d wear it outside if he thought it wouldn’t draw too much attention to them.

Nicky traces mindless patterns to Joe’s chest while they hold each other, no words needed after almost a thousand years. Where Joe loves loudly, each act a declaration of his love, Nicky knows his love is quiet. Private. Just as intense. He’d been shy before Yusuf; he’d taken his vows seriously, and when he’d met his beloved in battle, his love for him became new vows. 

They create a sacrament in their bed. Nicky knows no other worship than this altar; he would not have it any other way.

“You have found an excellent way to distract me,” Joe comments idly after Nicky has sucked him off, his cheek now resting on his glowing, brown skin. Joe’s fingers tangle in Nicky’s short hair and tug a little so his scalp stings. “Do not think I am not aware of what you are doing.”

“Hmm?” Nicky kisses the inside of Joe’s thigh, a lazy movement as he sucks his lips together and draws skin into his mouth until Joe hisses and tugs at his hair again.

“You are trying to distract me from the memory of you hurt,” Joe says, his voice too close to grief for Nicky to continue teasing. He rests his cheek on Joe’s leg once more and stares up at him, wondering if this was how Moses felt when receiving his Commandments. “It will not work.”

“I thought I was doing a good job.”

“You are.” Joe’s thumb traces his cheekbone, and Nicky closes his eyes and lets himself drift a little in the favor of his beloved. “You are so precious to me, amore mio. I will never be able to forget how they hurt you. I have not forgotten any of your deaths; I will not forget this one so quickly.”

“And yet I live,” Nicky points out, kissing Joe’s hipbone and drawing himself up and closer to him so he can kiss his mouth gently. “I live for you.”

“I will die for you,” Joe murmurs. “I would want to die before you, habibi, I could not bear to live a moment without you-”

“It’s the same for me,” Nicky assures him. He pulls back and studies Joe’s face, sees the agony written there. “Caro mio. We are much younger than-”

“Don’t say it.” Joe kisses him urgently, a hand pressed firmly to the back of his neck. “Nicolo, please, do not say it.”

“I will come back to you,” Nicky whispers. “Always. This is not our time. We have more time still.”

It was Yusuf’s eyes that captivated him first on the battlefield; dark, beautiful, expressive. Nicky wished for Joe’s talents more than once so he could try and capture the lightness in the dark brown, the kindness and fortitude and passion there. He cannot draw, so he looks as often as he can, takes his fill at the chalice of Joe’s beauty.

Yusuf’s eyes spill over with sadness now, and it erodes at Nicky’s heart.

“How can you be so sure?”

Before answering, Nicky takes Joe’s hand and kisses each knuckle, his lips molding and remolding to the fingers he’s loved for centuries.

“Because,” he answers simply, still holding Joe’s hand, “I have too much love in my heart for you. It cannot be our time; I have not shown you how much I love you yet.”

Joe kisses him so fiercely, Nicky thinks to their first wedding ceremony in 1142 and how he’d officiated for them, barely getting the words out before Joe kissed him so passionately they fell off the platform they were kneeling on in a burned down church.

They’d made love there, slowly but fiercely, still awkward at it, still messy, biting and bruising and loving endlessly.

“And you say  _ I’m  _ the incurable romantic.” Joe whispers when they pull away from each other.

“After nine hundred years, amore mio, it would have to rub off on me at some point.”

Joe’s next smile is wicked, and Nicky smiles joyously to see it. “I rub off on you plenty, habibi.”

Nicky’s laughter is lost in their kiss.

* * *

They drive to meet Nile and Andy, renting a car with tinted windows and excellent air conditioning. Nicky sits in the passenger seat, drowsily watching the desert sun warm the air of the car, casting Joe in a glorious light.

He looks like the angels set in stained glass; he looks like salvation, damnation, temptation -- he looks like absolution, and Nicky loves him for it.

“You stare at me so much, I worry that you will correct my driving,” Joe jokes, taking his hand from the armest and bringing to his mouth for a kiss.

“You drive wonderfully,” Nicky says sleepily. They trade an easy smile as they curve along the empty highway. “You do everything wonderfully.”

Joe waggles his eyebrows suggestively. “Everything?”

“You had me twice before breakfast.” Nicky closes his eyes with a smile, ignoring the gleeful pride emanating off of his beloved. “I’d think you’d have sated your appetite by now.”

“My appetite for you is endless,” Joe says huskily, his hand gripping Nicky’s thigh, fingers rubbing into muscle deliciously. “Shall I pull off the side of this road and prove it to you?”

“Prove it to me when we have a bed,” Nicky says, letting a bit of petulance creep into it. “I swear my ass is still sore-”

Joe laughs sweetly. “I’ll be good,” He promises. “I’ll be gentle.”

“Mhm.” Nicky cracks open an eye to smirk at him. “You say that, but what if I ask for more?”

“Then I will have to do my husbandly duties and obey you, habibi.” Joe takes his eyes off the road to smile at him. “I love you.”

Nicky opens his mouth to say the words back, because how could he not when Joe smiles so beautifully, but he’s interrupted in the worst way.

An armored car comes out of nowhere, barreling up and out of a ditch; Joe shouts in alarm, but it’s too late. It slams into the passenger side of the car, and Nicky feels himself dying immediately, bones shattering, head slamming into the airbag. He can hear Joe screaming curses as their car flies through the air, hears him begging Nicky to hold on, but darkness rolls over him.

“Destati,” calls him back from the ether. “Destati, Nicolo, per favore, don’t leave me-”

“I’m here,” Nicky answers weakly, patting Joe’s arm as he shudders, bones reorienting themselves. “Head injury. I’ll be good in a -” he groans as pressure explodes in his ear, whatever was ruptured sluicing back together. “Okay.” He nods and grabs his gun that’s tucked inside his jacket. 

At some point, Joe had pulled him from the wreckage of their car; they’re kneeling at the edge of a massive ravine. It’s a hundred foot drop at least, and Nicky has a feeling Joe’s already considered jumping into it. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“A dozen hostiles, maybe more,” Joe reports, his own gun already in his hand. Nicky sits up slowly from where he’s reclined in Joe’s lap, and holds his gun out. 

A head pops up from behind what’s left of their rental, and Nicky doesn’t even think. He pulls the trigger and the man’s brains join Nicky’s blood on the desert sand.

“Good shot.” Joe kisses his shoulder and they both stagger to their feet. “One less.”

A few more armed men try the same, and a couple lucky shots find their way into Joe and Nicky’s body, distracting them long enough that a formation of men emerges from behind the car and walks towards them slowly. They’re trained, Nicky thinks distantly. Unmarked, well-armed. Great.

“Our employers have been looking for you since the Merrick incident,” the man in front says. The leader, perhaps.

Nicky groans as Joe curses loudly. “You work for Merrick?”

“No. Their competitors though are very interested in whatever secret you’re hiding.”

Joe and Nicky trade a look; they don’t know they’re immortal then.

“Let me guess,” Joe says dryly. “You intend to bring us to your leader.”

Nicky checks his pocket and realizes that he’s out of cartridges.  _ Fuck.  _

“That’s our goal, yes.” The man pretends to put his gun down, but Nicky can count the weapons on his person; he can feel blood dripping down his knuckles from an already healed bullet wound on his shoulder. “We’ve been told that you two are … more civilized than some of your counterparts.”

“You’ve never pissed off Nicolo then,” Joe says, still amiable. 

Nicky begins to run calculations in his head; they’re about to be captured. They have almost no chance of escape. They can jump down the ravine, but they’ll follow them.

As though reading Nicky’s thoughts, the leader clears his throat. “If you manage to escape, we will find you again. We only need one of you,” he warns, and Nicky’s blood runs cold. “The instructions were at least one alive.”

“Sorry,” Joe says breezily, like he doesn’t care that they’re between a rock and a hard place, if a rock were a hundred foot drop and a hard place were a dozen assault rifles. “Didn’t they tell you? We-” he points back and forth between himself and Nicky, who eyes the drop behind them thoughtfully, “are a package deal. Two for one, I’m afraid.”

“Fine. Surrender your weapons and come peacefully.”

“Ah.” Joe lifts a shoulder, and Nicky lets himself watch him for a moment, his glorious, wonderful Yusuf. “That will also be a problem.”

He’s still running calculations; he has a sniper’s mind, after all. Best marksman in history. Nicky’s fought more wars than most historians can remember. He’s died hundreds of times, but he remembers the knife entering Joe’s body more than all of those deaths. He remembers the needle in Joe’s body more than any death. He remembers Joe, trapped. 

The calculations are leading him to an obvious conclusion.

His heart  _ hurts.  _ Dear God in Heaven, it hurts. A man should not be able to love this much - Nicky loves him, and he already feels guilt for what must be done. His beautiful, strong Yusuf.  _ Forgive me. _

The hired men creep forward, fingers on triggers, and Nicky’s finger itches too.

“Joe,” Nicky murmurs, unable to hold off any longer. “Yusuf.”

That gets his beloved’s attention; Joe takes his eyes off of the men holding guns on them and smiles at Nicky.

It’s as breathtaking as the first time, back on the battlefield when they were giving up on cutting each other down, when Yusuf Al-Kaysani smiled at Nicky as they both reared back to consciousness, blood staining his teeth. Nicky had fallen in love with him right before he’d slashed his scimitar through his ribs, and he’d died the fifteenth time thinking only of Yusuf and his beatific smile.

Sometimes he thinks it was serving a vengeful God that made him love Yusuf so quickly. Catholics in those days accepted that their God would kill them with slight provocation - when Yusuf drove the blade in, with every thrust, Nicky could only think  _ my destroyer is beautiful, and I love him as much as I fear him. _

He doesn’t fear Yusuf now, of course. Doesn’t fear much of anything. He only has one, primal fear. He won’t let it happen.

“Yusuf,” Nicky says softly, forming his real name carefully. “I love you more than God. Have for centuries.”

Joe’s eyebrows lift, surprised. “Blasphemy and poetry,” he praises. “Didn’t know you had that in you, Nicolo.”

“If you are my God,” Nicky continues, tightening his grip on his gun. “Will you forgive me?”

“I will always forgive you, habibi.”

He smiles at that, and they embrace each other, even with a dozen guns pointed at them, and Nicky relaxes into Joe’s touch, lets himself be wrapped in it for three seconds they can’t afford.

“Yusuf,” he murmurs as they pull away, Joe’s hand soft on his face. “I only have one bullet left.”

“Make it count, amore mio.”

Nicky’s lips twitch humorlessly, and he turns his head to face the armed men; Joe’s hand lingers on the side of his face, warm contact. Nicky closes his eyes and barely lifts his gun. His aim is perfect; Joe’s hand leaves his face, and Nicky feels colder than he ever has at the loss of his touch.

Joe shouts in pain and betrayal and shock as Nicky’s bullet shoots through his foot. The armed men all startle, and as their leader gestures them to run forward, Nicky plants his hand on his beloved’s chest and pushes viciously.

Nicky’s shot in the calves twice, three times, four, and he slams into the dirt and catches a bullet in the hip as a cruel echo of his beloved’s pain. Nicky doesn’t even feel the bite and burn of the metal ripping through his body; he slumps forward and watches Joe tumble down the ravine, his bones breaking in a way that has acid burning in Nicky’s throat.

“Forgive me,” he moans as the men seize him and drag him away from the edge, clearly fearing that he’ll follow Yusuf (and he would, he’d follow his darling Joe to the gates of Hell and back). “Forgive me!” He screams in Arabic as they haul him backwards, forcing him to step down on broken legs. “Forgive me,” he whispers one last time in Italian as he stares up at a pale blue sky, right before the butt of a gun meets his forehead and all he knows is darkness.

* * *

Yusuf comes back to life messily; his bones groan and pop as he screams for his Nicolo.

He’s gone.

Even as he screams and screams Nicky’s name, all iterations of it, Joe knows that the worst has happened: they’ve taken him, and he’s been left for dead.

Hauling himself out of the shallow stream at the base of the ravine, Joe forces himself to start climbing, his ribs still knotting together. He moans in pain, but it’s not of his body. It’s of his heart as fear makes it hard to clench his hands into shapes to fit the crags of rock. He stumbles and falls back a dozen times, thinking of that ludicrous story about Sisyphus in Hades that Andy was always so keen on, but at last he makes it to the top of the cliff once more.

He staggers to the place he’d lost Nicky, but all he finds is dark brown stains bleeding into dust. “Nicky,” Joe mutters, his jaw trembling as he falls to his knees and pats at the still drying spots. “Nicky, no, no, no-”

He gives himself ten precious seconds to scream into the desert, rage and fear and grief stirred together in a sound that barely counts as human. It’s more than human, just as Nicky was more than love to him - after ten horrible seconds, Joe stands up and begins to walk. It’s a long way out of the desert, and he expects to die of exposure more than once.

He’ll die a thousand times before resting. He won’t know rest until he sees Nicky’s eyes one last time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading -- chapter two won't be far behind, which may or may not interest people!!!!
> 
> Please please please let me know what you think! (and what you'd like to see in chapter two as Joe makes good on his promise to burn the world down for his beloved)


	2. And What I Have Failed To Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicky tries to survive the new round of torture and experimentation; Booker receives a shocking call from Andy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO! Thank you to everyone who commented and left kudos on the last chapter! It was super encouraging to hear what you have to say and also I LOVE that you all also love Nicky/Joe
> 
> Quick Author's Note about this chapter: POV shifts between Nicky and Booker! 
> 
> you'll notice that this jumped from a two-shot to a three-chapter fic. This chapter got really long and I needed to break it apart so it would be less stressful (and it would give more natural breathing room to the conclusion where there will be a glimmer of peace again). There's a LOT of **torture** in this chapter so PLEASE read the warnings!
> 
>  **Potential Trigger Warnings**  
>  Blood  
> Needles  
> Bone drills  
> Broken Bones  
> Forced drugs (morphine // experimental drugs/poison)  
> Temporary character death (multiple/Nicky)  
> References to off-screen torture and experimentation

It’s their thirty-fourth wedding, but Joe swears it feels as new as the first.

In the summer sunlight, Nicky looks out over the Mediterranean, watching the way light plays off of the calm, deep blue. He’s wearing a simple grey suit that Joe had picked out gleefully when the news had come through that the Italian government had finally legalized same-sex unions.

“June 5!” Joe had shouted when their phones had buzzed with the update. “We gotta be in Malta by June 5 - where did Andromache go, huh?” He’d kissed Nicky’s cheek a dozen times before dialing Andy, roaring “June 5! Malta!” into the phone with little to no explanation.

Nicky had rolled his eyes of course, laughing off his darling Joe’s incurable romanticism, but he’d gone to Malta and bought the suit and put down the deposits, and now they’re standing in a courtyard with Andy and Booker while he hears bells toll out from a nearby church.

“Did you want a bigger party, habibi?” Joe asks sweetly, wrapping his arms around Nicky from the back; Nicky leans into Joe’s strong chest and shakes his head.

“This is perfect.”

“Perfect would be the wedding that the little English prince got - you deserve an audience of millions, Nico.”

“Sap.” Nicky turns in his arms and gets a kiss for his trouble; Joe can’t stop smiling, and Nicky feels his own expression relax into it. 

The music changes on the little stereo Booker had wired up earlier, and Joe takes his hands and tugs him towards the cobblestone dance floor.

“Our first dance, Nicky!”

“More like ten thousandth.” He lets himself be led anyway, happy to go wherever as long as Joe’s holding his hand.

Joe sighs as he wraps his arms around him again and starts to sway to  _ At Last _ .

“Each one a miracle,” he murmurs into Nicky’s ear. Nicky can only smile and rest his cheek on Joe’s shoulder, palm pressed to his shoulder as firmly as though he were at prayer.

It’s a good song; he remembers when it was released. He remembers Etta too, spectacular, vibrant Etta. She’d deserved much more from this life.

Nicky hears Andy laughing. It’s a rare enough sound that he lifts his head and smiles at the sight of her dancing barefoot on cobblestones, her killer heels abandoned on the table. Her gaudy diamond necklace drips off the back of her chair like forgotten rosary beads, and Booker spins her, his tie loose and shirt half-unbuttoned in the warm air.

Book seems to be on the right side of drunk for once, and he claps Joe on the back as he and Andy twirl past, much too fast for this song. They both laugh at their friends’ antics, and Joe kisses Nicky’s jaw before pulling back slightly to smile at him.

Nicky knows this memory well. He’s played it many times in his head, like he plays the memory of many of their weddings when he feels lost or alone or scared.

June 5, 2016. Malta. Sunlight. Warm. Peaceful. Happy. 

Before they met Copley, before Morocco, before Merrick.

He runs through his memories like he used to do with prayers, fingers skipping from bead to bead of sensation and feeling. There’s penance to be found in his worse memories, and absolution in the good ones. 

Peace is in Joe’s arms. 

He thinks about peace as they waltz slowly, and his back twinges slightly. Joe shushes him softly, a broad hand held to the unexpected soreness.

Peace is the fruit of charity. He’s not so old to remember Gregory, announcing from his papal seat that there were seven deadly sins - and seven virtues to balance them out -- but as a priest, he’d had much time to reflect on charity. Charity, to balance greed.

It was not charity he found on the way to Jerusalem. His church, his beloved church, had wanted something and had killed for it. Nicky’s soul trembled with doubt long before Yusuf plunged a blade in his chest. But there, at the gates of Jerusalem, he’d reawakened and through some benevolence, found his Yusuf still alive. A gift, then. 

He could not want for anything in this universe, so long as Yusuf breathed. 

Charity gives him benevolence, gives him generosity, gives him the ability to sacrifice.

Sacrifice - Nicky turns his face away from the sacrifice made at the top of a cliff. Yusuf shushes him again, holds him as tenderly as a babe, and Nicky tries not to sob. Not on their wedding day.

He thinks about the sunlight. The blue water. The warm air. Andy’s black dress.

No. She wore green.  _ Black?  _ Green.

The image of Andromache spinning becomes fuzzy, and nausea rocks him fiercely even as Joe holds him tighter.

“Forgive me,” Nicky mumbles into the linen shirt Yusuf wears. “Please forgive me-”

“I will always find you,” Joe whispers back, a hand to the back of Nicky’s head, a tender gesture.

A necessary one; it feels as though Joe is trying to hold his life in his hands, pushing back the inevitable tide of what he found at the end of Keane’s gun. Hot liquid pours from his hair into the collar of his suit. The suit will be ruined. 

If this were their wedding day in Malta, four years ago, Yusuf would say, “let’s see about a hotel room, hm, Nicolo?”

But instead, Joe says, “I will burn down the world for you.”

_ Ah,  _ Nicky thinks,  _ that’s not the right memory.  _

The memory slips and shimmers and skips ahead like a record gone off its track, and then Quynh is there, her dress drenched.

“Joe,” Nicky whispers, tugging on Joe’s sleeve. He stops dancing, but Joe’s hands remain frozen in the air in a pantomime of an embrace. “Yusuf, darling, look-”

“Can I cut in?” A newly familiar face beams up at him, sunshine and danger in one lovely package.

“Nile?” Nicky blinks, and then looks back at Joe, who puts a hand to Nicky’s chest. 

“I’ll be your heart,” Yusuf swears, agony in his face. “I’ll be your heart if they take it from you-”

_ We’re losing him,  _ a distant voice shouts.  _ Fuck, not again!  _

_ God,  _ Nicky thinks as he stumbles backwards towards the low wall.  _ God’s come at last to take me. _

God speaks, and He sounds bored.  _ Give it a minute, he’ll be back. _

A cloud rolls over the sun, throwing shadow over their party; Andy’s wearing combat black, Booker’s bleeding out, Nile looks like an avenging goddess, axe in one hand, a classic M14 in the other. And Joe -

“Joe?” Nicky repeats, his balance still slipping, “Joe, what’s happening?”

“I’m going to find you,” Joe murmurs; his hand reaches out to him, God creating Adam - Nicky reaches back but can’t manage to touch his fingers. “You and me, together. Always.”

“Joe?”

Nicky tips backwards over the low wall of their private courtyard and plummets towards the water. Lucifer, falling from Heaven, to the boiling sea. 

Right before he hits the Mediterranean, the water that once gave him life, Nicky hears a flatline and thinks, distantly,  _ oh. That’s me. _

* * *

Booker is sleeping in some shitthole hotel in Paris that he can’t be fucked to learn the name of. He eats when he remembers to, but finds most human comfort at the bottom of wine bottles. Every day he wakes up, eyes gritty, throat sore from vomiting in his sleep -- how many times must he have suffocated that way -- and considers what he’s done. 

When he reaches the wound in Andy’s side that he never got to see healed, when he reaches Nicky’s blood and lungs and muscles in little jars on a sterile table, when he reaches Joe’s roar of righteous fury, his hands start to shake.

He gets another bottle. He sits at the Seine. He drinks.

Interesting days, or what passes as interesting now, come when Copley calls to ask his opinion on a case. If he’s heard of this shadow group or that. 

Copley could just ask Andy. Booker knows they’re still in contact. He knows Copley’s checking in on him. He could call him out on it, but it’s the moments where he’s suggesting a way to break an encryption or offering a tidbit of the twentieth century that he remembers that he feels more like himself. More like Sebastien, and less like this pathetic, groveling, weakling he’s become.

His phone rings three months after Merrick. 

Booker hasn’t gotten a call from Copley in two weeks (they tend to come every three weeks, just when Booker’s at the end of his rope and is considering new ways to make the next century go faster). He has a terrible hangover his body hasn’t quite pushed out of his system yet, so he drinks some water and bangs his head on the floor and waits for it to subside.

Copley will wait for him to call back, he’s sure.

The phone rings again.

“Merde.” Booker grabs the phone off the nightstand with the tips of his fingers and drops it down to the floor; it smacks into his face, bruising his cheekbone, but it’s already healed by the time he brings the phone to his ear. “Copley. Busy.”

“Not Copley.”

He sits upright, letting the wine bottle that had been resting on his stomach roll across the filthy floor. “Andy?” He breathes her name gently, tears in his eyes. 

She’ll be dead before he’s allowed to see them all again. He can’t seem to escape the thought.

“Andy, you’re alright?”

Her voice is cold, but in the coolness of her tone, he hears terror. “They have Nicky.”

His blood runs cold, and he stares at the wall for a moment. “Who has Nicky?”

“Figuring that out now. It’s been … it’s been at least five days.”

“Where are you?” Booker scrambles to his feet and starts to haul what meager belongings he has with him back into his go-bag. 

“Algiers. We pulled Joe from the desert three days ago.”

Booker curses, checks his passport and money clip, and tucks them in his pocket. “I’ll be there in five hours,” he promises. “Andy-”

“Get here.” She hangs up, and a moment later, a set of coordinates comes through. 

Booker zips his bag and hauls it on his shoulder, his foot catching against empty bottles as he runs for the door.

* * *

He’s at the safehouse not even 5 hours later; he’d caught the next nonstop flight into Algiers out of Paris, throwing down an extra thousand dollars to get himself a seat at the front of the plane. 

Normally, he prefers the back, the anonymity of it when flying commercial. But his forgeries are good, and he doesn’t have to take his sunglasses off. He’s sure the flight attendants find stress in the way he vibrates in his seat, eyes glued to the window as though that will urge on their airplane faster. 

He rejects every drop of liquor they offer him; he jerks his head messily when the braver attendant kindly asks, “fear of flying?” 

Booker sprints up the ramp when they finally land, bursting into the drier heat of Algiers; his bag swings against his back as he heads for the rental car station, grabbing the keys for the vehicle he’d reserved pre-flight.

It’s four hours, thirty-six minutes after Andy’s call to him that Booker slams into the door of the safehouse, cursing vividly when a bullet flies through the door and hits him in the side.

“Merde!” He snarls for the fifteen-hundredth time that day. “It’s me, it’s Booker, let me in-”

Nile opens the door, gun still cocked and her finger on the trigger; she watches his face for a long moment, barely glancing at his raised hands before she glances over his shoulder and nods. Tucking her gun into her waistband, she pulls him in for a surprising but welcome embrace. 

It’s far too short.

Andy comes in a second later, rolling her eyes at the sight of him, or perhaps at the painfully audible sigh of relief he releases on her appearance. “Oh fuck, you should have called ahead.”

“You said it was urgent,” Booker argues, but he recognizes the wisdom of Andy’s words quickly when Joe bursts into the room behind her, his eyes wild.

“This is your fault” He screams in broken Arabic, and Booker doesn’t flinch away from the horrific punch Joe lands. His nose breaks immediately, and he spits out blood as it resets. “You did this! This was you!”

“Joe!” Nile cries, already upset at the violence, and Booker holds up a hand to her and shakes his head, even as Joe crowds in, pushing him up against the wall and beating on his chest with tight fists.

“You!” He shouts furiously. “This is your fault!”

“I know,” Booker says weakly, taking the next hit across the face. “God, I know, Joseph, je sais-”

“If you hadn’t-” Joe sobs now, and that’s worse than the screaming, but he still strikes at Booker. They can all see how his body is sagging, like a marionette giving up the tension of her strings. “If you - they  _ know  _ about us, and they took him, and they …” he chokes on his next sob, “they’re hurting him, my Nicky.”

“Je sais,” Booker catches Joe’s wrist on the next punch across his jaw, and he winces as the blood pools and recedes. “Joseph, our Nicky, I-”

“My Nicky!” Joe pushes him violently and stands back for a moment, shaking his head and weeping openly. “Nicolo,” he sobs desolately, hands to his face.

Even when he lost his own wife and children, Booker does not think he looked so distraught. This is pain beyond pain.

Joe mutters something in a language older than half of them, and then surges forward, his hands pounding weakly on Booker’s chest. Nile starts forward, concern in her brown eyes, but Booker only wraps his arms around his friend, until the brutal punches turn into scrabbling fingers on his torn shirt, into hands fisted in the fabric as Joe holds on for dear life, sobbing deeply as Booker holds him.

“My fault,” Joe is moaning now, “it’s my fault, Nicky, Ya Rab, my-”

Booker holds him tighter, and Nile finally moves forward, Andy letting her go; they both wrap around Joe as he shudders, horrible sobs ripping from his throat as he clings to Booker.

“Mea culpa,” he whispers, his fingers going slack. “Mea culpa, Nico, rimani vivo.”

Exhausted by the threat of her family’s imminent collapse, Andy stares out the window and rubs her jaw; she feels every one of her five thousand years.

* * *

They’re more polite than Merrick, Nicky thinks drowsily as they take another sample from his spleen. They give him morphine sometimes.

The doctor from the last lab, Kozak, is still alive; she works for whoever this new company is. Nicky loves Nile deeply and loves her kindness -- it is something they have in common, an ability to see the good in humanity -- but he does wish she had been slightly less kind in disarming Kozak back at the Merrick Labs.

Nicky considers asking Kozak the name of his host, but thinks against it. She does not seem to like him very much.

She is the only doctor that does not feel obligated to give him something for the pain, either before or during her procedures. He hears her once justifying it to her superior, saying that it dilutes the samples.

“Still finding ways to rationalize anything then?” Nicky asks her humorlessly when she returns.

He does not imagine that she shoves the needle into his side with more ferocity than medically necessary.

It’s no matter of course; the morphine is no doubt to make the faceless men and women who work with him feel better about what they are doing. It does not last long in his system, after all, his liver and various organs far too efficient to let it linger.

If the dose is high enough, he can have an hour or so of disconnect; if it takes longer … he chokes on blood and his own screams in equal measures. 

There have been many days since he first arrived; he counts by the colorful socks one of the lab technicians wears as he prepares equipment for Kozak to use. He’s counted at least nine different patterns. He likes the penguin socks the best.

He and Joe went on a vacation once in the southern hemisphere. Some unnamed island with plenty of the rock-hopping little birds. Joe had loved them dearly. Nicky smiles to think about it.

They’ve stopped his heart just to restart it; they’ve stopped it to see how long it would restart on its own. He’s died of hypothermia, of blood loss, of shock. He hopes they don’t try to kill him with smallpox. He doesn’t miss smallpox.

Something they inject him with makes his entire body burn, and he sobs deliriously, calling out for Yusuf. It kills him in four minutes, something that makes Kozak smile as she types new notes, and Nicky feels painfully cold when he comes back to life.

He starts to whisper in Latin, still delirious from the memory of pain, shying away from the grotesque sight of pieces of himself lying out on the table.

“What are you saying?” Kozak asks after half an hour of his mumbling.

“Prayers,” Nicky answers; his arm twitches - they’ve still got him hooked up to the IV, he realizes. Whatever had killed him the last time might still be in there.

Nicky looks to the opposite wall when Kozak comes to him with a drill; he knows what it’s for by this point. He tries to block out the sound of it, which is harder to ignore than the feeling of it, and he grimaces and screams through clenched teeth before he chokes out another Latin phrase that has Kozak pausing.

“You still have faith after all these years?”

When he doesn’t answer, she tsks and starts to drill again.

After she’s done, Nicky looks up at the ceiling and whispers again. 

“I was a priest,” he tells her, his mind wandering to Last Rites. He doubts she would read them for him. “Nine hundred years ago.”

This makes her pause again from whatever she’s typing up. 

“You’re very old.”

Nicky gives her a tight smile. “That’s rude.”

“Have you ever seen the god you pray to?” Kozak asks, coming around with a syringe.

Nicky shakes his head slowly. “I have never seen God.” Kozak’s face doesn’t change as she loads whatever’s in the syringe into the IV pumping into his arm. 

He takes a shuddering breath to focus through the wave of pain. “I have seen someone stronger than God. He does not forgive so easily. So. I do not pray to God for my own sake.” He turns his head and stares at her, whatever they put in him burning sluggishly through his veins again. “I pray to God for you.”

Kozak is rattled, and he’s sure he’ll pay for that later. For now, Nicky closes his eyes again and lets himself drift, his mouth forming the syllables of Joe’s name weakly as he struggles to keep his grip on life. The last prayer he’ll ever need.

He does not pray to God for forgiveness for a millennium of what must qualify as sin. He turned his back on the cloth, on the Church, on his Crusade, after all -- but not since 1099 had Nicolo hurt his beloved on purpose. He prays to God to forgive the souls of those that will die when he is found, but it is to Yusuf that he prays for himself. The only atonement he seeks is at the hands of his love.

_ Yusuf, forgive me.  _

_ If I should die before you find me, forgive me. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so Joe will find his Nicky in the next chapter, and I'm so sorry for all the whump (but am I sorry? Ugh I'm the worst). Please rest assured that Joe will avenge his beloved very thoroughly. 
> 
> thank you again for reading, and if you're still with me, I'd love to hear what you think even if it's just incoherent screaming on behalf of our sweet italian former-priest. 
> 
> [I really need to write a smutty one-shot where nothing bad happens to these two]


	3. (ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After several false leads, the team finally discovers their lost member.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO 
> 
> If you're still with me/don't hate me fully, here is the CONCLUSION. It's as long as the last two chapters combined (oops) and it's ... it's a lot!
> 
>  **Warnings**  
>  More torture/references to torture (less graphic, as the POV shifts away from Nicky and when it is Nicky, he's trapped in an existential Purgatory)  
> Gun violence/action movie violence  
> Murder/death (permanent)  
> References to **morphine** and **death by drug overdose**  
>  (Also some scary false starts, please bear with me til the end though! Happy ending guaranteed!)

Nile has only been with the group for three months, but it already feels like years. Andy is her mentor, Joe is her confidante, and Nicky is her older brother.

And she wants her brother back.

She also wants to like Booker; and to be fair, she has the least reason in the group to hate him at the moment. Whatever anger Andy and Joe are still harboring towards the Frenchman dissolve after that first tense encounter, and Booker slips back into place (albeit uneasily) as they tear around the globe, looking into any pharmaceutical company that was known to be a direct competitor to Merrick.

Paradis, headquartered in France, is their best bet after two weeks of searching. Booker smiles mirthlessly when Andy informs them they’ll be headed back to Paris.

“You don’t like Paris?” Nile asks dubiously as they load up their weapons. They’re leaving a safehouse in Prague, where they’d chased their last lead to.

“Paris does not like me,” is the terse reply, but Booker still winks a little at her as he packs C-4 with the same loving care most people applied to their family photos. 

“He drinks all their liquor and usually ends up wasted in some museum,” Andy says, and it would be teasing if it weren’t for how matter-of-fact it sounds. “Crying his eyes out, eating a brick of cheese with a knife.”

“Ha ha. Not funny.”

Andy shoots Booker a stern glance, and he wilts and nods. He’s going to have to take a lot of snarky comments to even scratch the surface of the shit he’s pulled on the rest of them. Nile likes to think Andy’s almost-sort-of-teasing him to show him that things can be normal again.

But none of this is normal. Nicky is missing, and Nile has cried more than once about it; Joe’s past tears at this point, vibrating out of his skin constantly with barely restrained rage and grief. Andy had almost pinned him down until he slept two days ago, but the circles under his eyes are more pronounced than even Nicky’s had been after Merrick.

Joe is heartbroken. It’s a cliche term, and it’s not Nile’s favorite. If you’d asked her six months ago, she would say that it was overused to the point where it didn’t have a meaning.

Joe gives it a meaning again.

It’s when they’re all in the car, driving through the back streets of Paris, that she clears her throat and checks her gun for the twentieth time and asks the question she’s been avoiding.

“Is this the longest time?” She asks quietly to Booker, who’s in the backseat with her. 

“Longest?” Booker murmurs back. His eyes flit to the tense profile of Joe in the front seat, and then to the disarmingly relaxed shoulders of Andy. Back to Joe. “Ah. Yes. Unless you count…”

He trails off meaningfully, and Nile nods, throat tight and lungs heavy with the memory of drowning, drowning like she does every night as she dreams of a woman she’ll never meet.

Joe takes a ragged breath and his clenched fist bangs against his own thigh as he grips the door’s handle.

“He isn’t like Quynh,” Nile hears Andy say to Joe in a low, firm voice. “They need him for something. They wouldn’t…”

They’re quiet for a minute, and Andy fiddles with the gear shift for something to do; it’s unlike her to fidget at all. Nile’s eyes go to it, lock onto the nervous movement. She doesn’t know if it’s the mortality making her seem so much more vulnerable, or the fact that they haven’t seen or heard from Nicky in weeks.

“Two weeks.” Joe’s voice, usually so musical, comes out more like gravel. “Two weeks, Andromache.” He says something extensively in Arabic, the grief so much more palpable in his native language.

Andy answers quickly, eyes leaving the road for half a second, and Joe mutters something back, voice catching into a sob.

Nile leans forward and grabs Joe’s shoulder tightly. “We’re going to find him,” she promises firmly. “We will.”

Joe shudders but his hand comes to grip her fingers; he nods once and smiles at her in the side mirror of the car. He has a beautiful smile - Nile noticed that about him first. How kind his smile was, how freely he smiled compared to Andy and Booker -- even compared to Nicky, whose eyes were kind even when his face was not.

His smile looks different now, and Nile squeezes harder, swallowing back her own sadness to nod, determined, at her friend.

“Are you ready for the job, Booker?” Andy asks calmly, like her oldest friends in the world aren’t missing or falling apart, respectively. 

“In and out. Data collection. No explosions.” Booker sighs wistfully, patting the handle of his go-bag. “Sounds easy to me, boss.”

“If we don’t hear from you in sixty, I come in,” Andy warns.

“No.” Nile shakes her head. “That’s ridiculous, _I’ll_ go in.” She looks around the car and sees Booker and Joe are both avoiding looking at her. “What? It makes the most sense, if something is fucked, I should go!”

“Nile,” Joe says gently. “Nile, my darling girl, you are so brave, but also …”

“Young,” Booker finishes when Joe can’t. Nile scoffs, about to say the obvious _so I’m healthier than all of you old assholes!_ but Booker cuts her off. “We have seen the worst of this world, Nile. We do not want you to see it just yet.”

“Especially after you came to us with … such a bang,” Andy adds dryly.

“I saved all of you, didn’t I?” Nile half-laughs, absolutely incredulous, but Booker only gives her a sad smile. “C’mon, I had my _throat slit._ I’ve seen shit, I’ve been to war!”

“Not as many as we have.” Booker sighs and his eyes go to the two in the front. “If they got you, Nile, we-”

“We would have failed. Again.” Joe’s entire body is made of rigid lines when Nile looks at him. “I … I can’t-”

They pull up to a light, and Andy slams on the brakes. _“Im tufshal Nikulas,”_ Andy says, her voice sharper than before. “Joe. Look at me.” She stares at Joe, who barely turns his head to look at her, his hair poking out endearingly from his backwards hat. “You didn’t.”

Andy parks a few blocks away from the Paradis headquarters; Booker grabs his perfectly forged access card and nods at her in the rearview.

“Clock starts when that door closes,” Andy reminds him, and Booker opens the door.

“Booker.” Joe says his name willingly for the first time that Nile can remember since Merrick; she feels her eyebrows rising in surprise. Booker looks surprised too, and ducks his head back into the car. 

“Find him,” Joe whispers, his hand tight on Nicky’s sword, which he rarely lets out of his sight now.

Booker nods, his face solemn. “Of course.”

They sit quietly in the car as Booker disappears, and Nile watches, mildly impressed, as Andy becomes as still as a marble statue, her eyes watching the livestream from the camera hooked through Booker’s shirt. 

“Maybe if we split up,” Joe says suddenly after five minutes of tense silence. “Went in different directions-”

“We aren’t splitting up,” Andy answers calmly, zooming in on the screen as Booker approaches the employee entrance. “I won’t risk us being separated again.”

“What if-”

“What if they take you, too?” Andy looks away from the screen and glares at him. Nile feels awkward, like she’s watching older relatives fight (and, in a way, she is). “What if they take Nile? Or Booker? Or they shoot me as I’m trying to find one of you and there’s no one there, or _worse,_ they shoot you, and you stop healing too? Huh? What then, Joe?”

Nile feels cold now. “Is that possible? Wouldn’t there be some kind of warning?” She doesn’t want to think about a world without Andy -- if Joe or Nicky was lost too…

She’s largely ignored by the other two at the moment.

“You think I would care if I died in search of Nicky?” Joe retorts. “That is a weak hypothetical, Andy. As if there were a greater reason on this earth to--”

“How will Nicky feel if we find him and have to tell him that you’re gone?” Andy’s voice is colder than the steel of her axe now, and Nile glances down the street, wondering if she should just stroll over to that bakery and get something to snack on because _wow_ it’s messy in here.

This catches him off-guard, and Nile thinks the argument might be done, finally. But then, right as she’s considering walking over to the bakery anyway, Joe talks again.

“I died twenty times defending my home in the Crusades,” he says, staring out the window. “Each time, I thought it might be the last, and I was ready to meet my God for it.” 

Nile waits for him to finish the thought. A lot of immortality is waiting, she’s come to realize.

“When we were on that cliff, Nicky made a decision. I wish so badly - you will never know how badly - that he had made a different choice, that he had let us go together. But he made it, and I … I will try to understand. I am trying to understand. If I die for Nicky, I die for my home. He will understand. I know it.”

Joe returns his gaze to his gun; he checks it meticulously and the sound of clicking metal echoes around the silent car. 

Nothing more is said until Booker returns, head down, moving swiftly as he rounds the corner, less than fifty minutes later.

He slides into the car and releases a breath, shaking his head at Andy as he lowers his hood. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Joe repeats. “You’re sure?”

“They’re absolutely - well, I won’t say clean, I took the liberty of downloading some things that I am _sure_ INTERPOL will be interested in - but there’s nothing that indicates that they gained a new, interesting project in the last few weeks. No mercenaries hired, no hidden labs-”

Joe takes a deep breath and gets out of the car, causing Booker to stop talking as he watches Joe warily. Nile, for a wild moment, thinks he’s going to scream or run away or punch something.

Instead, he stands for a moment, head bowed, before he turns and braces himself on the hood of their car.

It’s one of Andy’s favorites, more bulletproof than Bond or the Batmobile, with tinted, reinforced windows and doors.

Nile can hear Joe sobbing through it all anyway.

* * *

Nicky dreams of Joe.

His hands are soft; his smile is kind. His beloved has the most beautiful smile. Nicky has seen over 340,000 sunrises, and none are so glorious as Yusuf al Kaysani when he smiles. He likes to trace it with his finger when they hold each other in bed. 

It’s a fabulous thing, really; when he begins to trace his lips, Joe only smiles wider, giving him more to do, more to marvel at.

He wants to see Joe’s smile again.

Whatever they’re doing to him now is worse than before, so Nicky recedes. He retreats inwards, past the layers of himself, unraveling to his core, shedding years and centuries like no longer needed baubles.

God is close to the core of himself; but Joe is the true center of it all.

Yusuf will save him, Nicky thinks as he floats in this nothingness. He is in Limbo, feeling his sins burn away. The terrible things he has done and seen and stopped. None of it has meaning anymore. He has never been in this much pain in his life, not even when he caught the plague seven hundred years ago and begged Yusuf to kill him so it could just restart.

Whenever he wakes, whenever his heart leaps back to life, it hurts again. There’s no reprieve, no sanity to this. Nicky slips further into his mind, replays memories so far down that he has to argue with himself as though he were Aquinas working out every logical point to belief.

He believes that Yusuf on their thirteenth wedding day was the most handsome man who ever lived; his hair in those days, long and so distinct as Nicolo ran his fingers through it. But, that leaves open a fallacy, for Yusuf on their thirtieth wedding day was the most handsome man in history on that day as well.

Nicky smiles (or at least, his soul does, while his body screams in pain) when he thinks of Yusuf being the most consistent thing in history. Always handsome. Always kind. Always sturdy.

He hopes he has been as constant to his love as Yusuf has been to him; he wishes they had stayed in bed a little longer on the last day, regrets teasing him about _twice before breakfast_ when he should have taken him up on the offer of infinity.

That last day, feeding each other fruit by hand, licking juice from the webbing of Yusuf’s strong hands as he whispered such affection: Nicolo could have died from the bliss. Agony was to be loved so wholly, so completely, without reservation. True agony was being beheld by his lover, brought to ecstasy so entire that the universe fell away and lost all meaning.

He thinks his tormentors believe they have found the truth of agony in what they do to him, but he wishes he had the capacity to speak. He would tell them that it was in the eyes of Yusuf that he could be destroyed, and only there. For Yusuf rebuilds him, fortifies him -- and what can be destruction without creation? 

Yusuf is his stronghold, his last guiding star on the darkest of nights. _Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…_

Nicolo dies before he can finish the train of thought, and as his body gasps back to life, his spirit picks up on that winding road to salvation, these memories of Yusuf that he holds so dear to his existence.

He dreams of Andromache sometimes on this path, of Nile who he has just learned to love, of Quynh who he still loves so dearly, his lost sister. He forgives Booker. He forgives him. He weeps in his heart of hearts that Booker will never know how truly he has forgiven him. He thought he had _time._ He was so selfish. 

_Booker, I am sorry, Booker, perdonami -_

He forgives him, his brother in arms, his family. Part of his heart.

His soul remains Yusuf, and as Nicky dreams, he thinks he sees the end of everything, stretching on in a blinding light so infinite it makes the last millenia pale in comparison. Everything fades away against it, this obliteration waiting for him, everything.

Nicolo thinks of verses memorized in a dozen languages.

_And just as it is appointed for the man to die once, and after that comes judgement._

Perhaps this is his payment, he thinks as his mind is assaulted once more by fresh pain, new tortures. Perhaps this is what he must give back. Nine hundred blissful years, some wars here and there, loss, grief to be sure, but _bliss_ known in the love of a man so kind, so sturdy, that Nicky had built a home in him and not thought twice.

He has doubted God since his mother taught him his prayers.

Nicolo never could doubt Yusuf.

He was his first death, his truest life. He is sorry.

When it is particularly terrible, when the pain is too much to escape into his soul for refuge, Nicky imagines instead.

He imagines Joe coming to save him, how hard of a time he will give him then; such jokes will be thrown his way for months, maybe years. His love will tease him so, ask him to wear a tracking device, offer to carry him around like a backpack. 

He imagines that Joe will tie him down to their bed and not let him leave for weeks; they will not make love there. No, Joe will be too worried for that.

The drill starts again, and Nicky loses his train of thought as his body betrays his spirit once more.

When he can think again, he thinks _Joe will be too worried to fuck me._

He might be able to convince Joe to let Nicky fuck him. Yes, that’s a thought. But no, Joe will tie him down, and feed him by hand, and kiss his body over every inch that has faced the tools of his captors. They will be there for quite some time.

As the darkness pulls over him once more, Nicky wonders if it will be the last time; he has never died this much, consecutively. He worries that their time comes when they’ve hit a finite amount of these deaths, these small escapes into the dark before they are thrown once more back into the light.

He thinks about that last morning. Like Christ in the Garden. That bed in that little hotel on the sea became their Gesthamene; he can still taste the pear Joe fed him, piece by piece as he licked the juice clean from his chin and jaw and hands. 

It is not a perfect metaphor; Nicky betrayed Joe. He became Judas to his savior. He kissed him in the night, and in the morning shot him, hurt him, probably killed him, all so that he could be led away by the Romans to die here on Calvary (it would not be the first time he died outside the gates of Jerusalem). No matter. He would not want Yusuf here next to him. He is glad his love is far away, even if he cries out so brokenly for him in his weakness.

Nicky feels his ragged breath tumble from his lips, and uses what is left of his strength to lift a finger and trace the memory of Yusuf’s smile, one last time.

* * *

A girl sobs in the bathroom stall of a Chipotle.

An employee comes and knocks. “Are you okay?” She whispers. “Are you safe?”

The girl sniffles and stands, wiping her face messily with the sleeves of her button down; her mother had bought it for her, ecstatic at her baby’s first real job. She opens the door and nods a dozen times. “Y-yeah.” She nods. “Shit, just - do you have a charger?”

The other girl goes and gets the charger, and lets the girl sit in the back of the kitchen while it charges. The girl cries here and there, and a few of the people cooking and prepping for the afternoon rush give her worried looks.

After twenty minutes, she unplugs her phone, whispers a quiet thank you to the kind employee, and slips out the back.

She opens an incognito browser to search for the number. It’s stupid. She feels stupid. That shit doesn’t make a difference, does it? Her fingers are shaking anyway as she dials, wiping her nose a dozen times as she calls the non-emergency line.

“Hello?” She listens to the operator speak calmly to her, and takes another shuddering breath. “I - I don’t know what I saw … I w-work for … oh God, they’ll kill me.”

“ _Who’s going to kill you? Ma’am? Ma’am I would like to send someone to help you, but I need to know where you are, and if you are currently safe.”_

She’s stopped talking. Shit. She gathers her strength and shakes her head. “I work for Elysium. And - and I saw … I think I saw them torturing someone.” She shakes her head again and coughs, a wet, awful noise. “No, they d-definitely were. He was - I don’t know, I went into the security room on the twentieth floor to ask about something else, s-someone took …. _Fuck,_ but I saw -- they turned the monitor, but the speakers were on, and he was … he was _sobbing,_ a-asking for someone to help him.”

“ _What did he say, ma’am? Also, could you confirm your location_?”

“He said something about _Joe,_ I don’t - I don’t speak i-italian, I’m sorry, shit I took Latin-”

She hears the line disconnect, and she hiccups weakly, about to burst into tears again as she scans the alley wildly.

Someone else speaks; cool, assured, British. “Ms. Renault?”

“H-how did you know-”

“Hello Ms. Renault, my name is James. Your call was redirected to my office. Could you please confirm some details for me?” 

* * *

Booker hates California. Too much fucking sunlight.

Good wine, though.

He slips into a booth across from a shaking girl in San Jose and smiles as reassuringly as he can.

“Sara?”

She looks up and nods, jittery like there’s a fire under her seat. To be fair, it probably feels that way.

“Hello Sara. I’m Sebastien.” He doesn't know why he uses his real name, but she relaxes infinitesimally at the personal detail.

 _She looks like she could be your -_ he won’t think about them. They’ve been dead for centuries.

“I’m friends with James.” _We betrayed my best friends together, if that’s what makes friends these days._ “He told me you could help me get into your building, maybe tell me more about what you saw?”

Sara shakes horribly as she speaks; and Booker resists the urge to wipe sleep from his eyes; they’ve been going since the call came in from Copley at midnight their time. That was almost thirteen hours ago. 

He doubts this girl has slept at all; she keeps looking over her shoulder, as though someone’s going to come into this all-night diner and try to kill her.

Although, as she explains shakily what she saw and what her company does, how much money they have, what they’re researching … Booker doesn’t think it would be _unsurprising_ if they tried to kill her.

_When this is over, he wants a drink._

She slides her access card across the table when she reaches the end of her story. “Please help him,” she whispers, her eyes haunted. “I barely saw anything, but … but I know they’ve been … busy with a new … test subject for almost three weeks, which means-”

“He’s my brother,” Booker tells her gently; it looks like she might cry at that, so he clears his throat. “We’re going to take care of him.” He stands and nods at the girl. “Lay low for a few days. Clean up your resume. You’ve already been wired a symbol of our thanks.”

“Wired?” The girl blinks, confused, but he winks at her like Joe would if he could wink right now. 

“Maybe don’t go to work tomorrow. Call out sick. Thanks again.”

He leaves with that, and as the glass door swings shut behind him, the girl frowns, and then gets a notification on her iPhone.

There’s an email from her bank, with the subject line _New Deposit Pending!_ She opens it; her eyes widen when she reads the contents, and she spills shitty diner coffee all over her pants.

_Memo: Buy a new phone, chérie._

_Transfer Amount: 100,000.00 USD_

* * *

“What are we walking into?” Andy asks, looking up at the building in front of them. She straps herself into the bulletproof vest to avoid further glares from Nile.

At the top of the imposing structure, nearly two city blocks wide, some office lights are still on.

Booker runs down the list of what he expects to find, the basic schematics of the building, and Joe doesn’t really hear any of it. It does not matter. Andy will lead, and he will kill, and he will not stop until he sees Nicky. 

Nile tosses Joe another gun. He catches it and tucks it into his waistband before checking his own gun.

He swears he feels his anger bloom, spreading out like a solar flare, when Booker finishes with, “I won’t tell you what I found in the security footage. It … it will not help to clear your head.”

“Are you going to be able to handle this?” Nile asks, not unkindly, as Joe checks the backseat of the car.

He doesn’t answer; he only grabs his scimitar and Nicky’s sword.

“He might not be in any shape to carry that,” his young sister warns.

“He will be.” It sounds like a profession of faith.

It is not pandemonium by any means as they enter the building through a rear; they ascend the levels quickly, using the stairs reserved for fire and other emergencies. Copley had promised a very convenient blackout on the stairs.

Elysium is less paranoid than Merrick. Somehow that had allowed them to fly under their radar for three weeks while they treated Nicky as a test subject, no doubt torturing him, breaking him, killing him.

Joe realizes he has not breathed in ten seconds; he forces himself to as they reach the appropriate floor.

 _Fifteen guards._ Nile signals down to him, as he waits on the stairs. Booker is fiddling with the door, doing some kind of magic, and Joe lets himself drift for a moment.

If there are guards still, it means there is something there to guard.

The door springs open, and they file through. The floor is mostly dark, and far too silent. Joe tries not to think of the news Copley shared with them earlier that day; how the girl who had found Nicky - _may Allah bless her_ \- had described inhuman screams of pain …

He will not think of it. He will think of nothing but his gun, and his sword, and his anger, until he sees his beloved.

Andy shoots the first guard as they round the corner; he moves still, and Joe shoots him in the head without blinking.

There is the lab that they were warned about, behind heavy doors. In the havoc that ensues around them, lights flashing as alarms sound throughout the building, klaxons declaring _security breach, twentieth floor, security breach,_ Joe only has eyes for those who proudly wear the uniform of his Nicolo’s tormentors. 

He moves in front of Nile and kills four without hesitating; he shoots one under Booker’s arm, he slashes the throat of one creeping up on Andy, he thinks _you will not take my family,_ as he detaches from any sort of human horror of so much blood and viscera.

He drags the last, breathing, bleeding guard to the door and slams his chest against the scanner; it reads his badge, smeared in blood though it is, and Joe throws him to the side, letting his head slam into a metal container. He will be dead soon enough; Yusuf does not care how this one meets his end.

They sweep into the lab, Andy forcefully shouldering her way to the front, and Joe grits his teeth against screaming in protest because _he should be the first to see -_

“Joe.” Nile has turned back around from where she was watching Andy’s six. “Joe, c’mon, we should go check to make sure there aren’t stragglers.”

He tries to get around Nile, and she uses her not inconsiderable strength to stop him. “No.” She shakes her head. “Nuh-uh, you don’t need to-”

Panic seizes him, and he shoves Nile hard enough to warrant an apology later. But for now, all he can think of is -

Booker tries to stop him too, but he’s running now to where Nicky is strapped to a table, less of a chair than the ones Merrick tortured them in. There are fridges of samples behind him, and he gags to think of where they might have come from, still sick as his eyes scan the lab frantically, trying to decipher the readings on Nicky’s vitals, trying to piece together what horrors happened here.

“Nicolo.” He shakes Nicky’s shoulder and hisses at how cold his flesh is. “Nicolo, destati.”

“Joe,” Andy whispers. “Joe, you should-”

“He’s breathing.” Joe kneels at Nicky’s side and lifts shaking hands to his - “Where is his hair?” he sobs, “What did they do to-”

Booker drops something with a clatter; Joe looks over at him and sees Booker taking a step back from a set of glass containers, all of which hold organic matter that’s clearly …

Joe looks away, weeping, and curls his fingers into Nicky’s cold arm. “Nicolo,” he begs, “per favore, look at me, please-”

There’s no sound in the lab, other than the faint, too faint, too far apart, sound of Nicky’s heartbeats.

“Why isn’t he waking up?” Joe whispers to no one in particular, fat tears dripping into his bed, down to the floor, as he clutches his beloved. “Nicolo, listen to me, please -”

“Sh.” Nile shushes him, her eyes going to a dark corridor. “Someone’s-”

They all hold their guns on the entry, all except Joe, who can’t seem to let go of Nicky.

“You.” Nile speaks, and it draws his attention.

It’s the blonde doctor, the one who worked for Merrick. Joe stands then, revulsion and hatred pushing him. 

She looks as though she might shit her pants. Good. She understands then, what he will do to her.

“What did you do to him?” Andy asks, bleeding from a cut on her temple.

Joe pulls the sheet down from Nicky’s chest, his eyes drawn to something strange.

There are chemical burns on his chest, near a tube that’s been slipped into his body. They do not fade under Joe’s gaze.

“Why isn’t he healing?” Joe whispers.

“What?” Booker asks, sounding shaken. Joe looks at the woman, Kozak, instead.

“What did you do to him?” He shouts, fury pulsing below his skin. 

“W-we-” The doctor holds her hands up when Nile sweeps forward, finger on her trigger. “I can explain. Maybe I can help?”

“You’ve done enough,” Andy says coldly. “Tell us what you know, and we’ll kill you quickly.”

“Don’t promise that for me,” Joe warns, so furious he can barely see. “Don’t make promises I can’t keep-”

There are explosions lower in the building, and Booker shrugs when they look at him. “Thought we should be more thorough than we were at Merrick,” he explains. “Speaking of which-” He pulls another charge from his bag, and Kozak screams in protest when he turns to the fridge.

“No!” She shouts, hands still raised. “No, that is enough research to save _millions_ -”

Andy moves forward with a terrifying grace and bends the doctor’s arm backwards until a crack resounds in the lab; she screams in pain. Tries to fall to her knees, but Andy digs a knee in her stomach and forces her to stand back up.

“What did you do to him?” Andy demands. “Besides all the other sick shit - why isn’t he healing?”

“We had your blood!” Kozak screams again in agony and tries to explain, her eyes locked on the knife Andy’s pulled from her belt. “We - we injected him with the blood we found after you left Merrick, wanted to see if it affected his genome-”

“What?” Joe sways in place, his eyes going to Andy. She doesn’t turn to him, but her eyes flicker to him, deeply concerned. “What the fuck does that mean for him?”

He grips the cold body of Nicolo; once, Nicky held the sun under his skin. It was why his eyes were so bright; Joe had written poems about it. He’s so cold now. 

His attention diverts from Kozak as he kneels at Nicky’s side again, fingers trembling as he smooths them over his shaved head. “Destati,” he begs. 

“He was in s-so much pain th-that they made me give him morphine,” Kozak continues, eyes wide. “I couldn’t figure out how to reverse the injection to make the pain stop, so we gave him m-morphine, b-but- I swear, it was the regular dose for him-”

“Fuck. His liver.” Andy pieces it together first.

“What?” Nile asks, her gun still trained on Kozak. 

Booker answers it for them. “He overdosed.”

Joe stands again and walks over, his steps slow. Almost calm. Booker glances at him, and Andy takes a step to the side as he takes the knife from her hand. “Is he healing at all?” Joe asks, trembling. The woman doesn’t answer, so he holds the blade to her neck, gripping her arm tightly with his free hand. “Will he heal?”

She can’t even look him in the eyes. “We don’t know.”

“I’m going to pull your fingers off, one by one,” he says coldly, anger making his voice steadier than it should be. “I am going to do _everything_ to you that you’ve done to my Nicolo - and then some. When I am done, no one who has ever loved you will recognize you. Unless you fix this.”

“I - I-,” Kozak sobs, trying to scramble away from him. “You don’t understand, this can save _millions_ -”

Joe roars, but it’s buried under the retort of a gunshot. Kozak goes limp in his hand, and he drops her dead body with a curse. He looks at the blood pooling under her head before turning on Nile, who hasn’t even lowered her gun.

“Why did you do that?” He shouts, his voice breaking.

“She was never going to help us,” Andy says tiredly, “C’mon, Joe, she-”

Nile finally answers him, her gun now raised between them. “He wouldn’t want you to do that.”

“What?” He spits out incredulously.

“Nicky wouldn’t want you to do that,” Nile repeats. “He wouldn’t.”

“Well, we can’t ask him, can we?” Joe asks raggedly. “Because he won’t wake up-”

There’s a terrifying beeping behind them, and he turns around, expecting the worst.

Booker’s standing there sheepishly, the pointy end of an IV drip in his hand; the monitor goes wild next to him, and Joe starts forward, eyes wide in horror -

Then Nicky gasps back to life, coughing horribly.

“Nicolo!” He rushes to his beloved’s side and takes him in his arms, sobbing weakly. “Nicolo.”

“I thought … that this didn’t look like saline,” Booker explains awkwardly, pointing at the IV that had been hooked into Nicky.

It’s so simple, really; Joe laughs bitterly at his own stupidity and shakes his head before kissing Nicolo’s brow.

“Yusuf,” Nicky whispers, still coughing. The burns on his chest don’t fade, but Joe can’t look at that right now. He can only see the clear blue-green of Nicky’s eyes, more beautiful than any ocean. “Y-”

“I’m here.” He kisses him again and cries. 

Andy replaces the cartridge on her gun, and Nile does the same; they’re both looking to the exit, and Booker’s setting up charges in the refrigerated section of the lab, one of his flashdrives plugged into Kozak’s computer.

They’re giving them some space, and Joe loves them for it.

“I-” Nicky coughs again, and Joe pulls him forward tenderly, into his lap. They’re both quite a mess at this point, the blood that had splattered on Joe’s tactical clothing smearing on Nicky’s mostly naked body. “I-”

“What is it, habibi?” Joe murmurs. Nicky shakes in his arms as Joe eyes the exit, nodding at Andy when she signals if they’re almost ready to go.

He’ll carry Nicky out; he isn’t ready to walk yet.

“I thought you’d have a s-s-speech planned,” Nicky whispers. “You always have a speech-”

“Shh.” Joe shakes his head and wraps the sheet around him more, wishing they’d thought to bring clothes.

He picks him up, wincing at how slight he feels -- his Nicky, so solid, so constant these past centuries, has somehow lost weight -- and carries him to the entryway where Andy waits.

Behind him, Booker sets up the last charge and passes Nile, who stares at the IV bag before taking it.

“This is going to be a real clusterfuck,” Nile announces as the distant sound of more hired guns approaches.

“Would it be a family outing if it weren’t?” Booker asks, smirking at Joe and then clasping Nicky’s bare (still cold, but don’t think about that) shoulder. “Welcome back, Nicolo.”

Nicky nods in recognition and then holds his hand out. Joe hands him a gun without thinking, and they press their foreheads together, Nicky’s eyes still distant from whatever else is floating in his system.

“Together?” He asks Joe sleepily.

“Always,” he promises Nicky fervently. “Forever.”

* * *

It is as Nicky predicted; Joe gets him into bed at their safehouse, way out on a remote island in Alaska, and doesn’t let him up for weeks on end. 

That’s fine. Nicky needs the rest.

He only moves to use the bathroom, to help cook once or twice, or to look out the window after testing the strength of his legs. Nile plays cards with him, tossing her hand on the sheets when she accuses him of cheating. Booker reads while sitting at his side, drinking Irish coffee at two a.m. when Nicky’s mind won’t let him sleep. Even Andy watches television with him, pretending to laugh at old Italian tv shows, holding his hand when he closes his eyes at another memory.

Joe never leaves his side; he curls around him, his arms a shield against the horrors of their past. His kisses wake Nicky from nightmares before they can start; when they come anyway, Joe is pulled from slumber, a hand anchored at his hip, his hands soothing and reassuring even when Nicky can’t quite convince himself that it’s real.

“What if I’m still there?” He asks once, feeling so detached from his body it feels as though his soul is a balloon barely tethered to his physical form. He watches himself on the bed, watches this story unfold as his beloved holds him on the too narrow bed in a rickety old house he can barely remember.

“What?” Joe kisses his fingers, frowning.

“I imagined you so many times,” Nicky confesses. “How you would care for me if you could find me. It was … the only thing I could do. What if I’m still there, trapped forever?”

“Why would you think that?” Joe whispers, pausing in his attentive kisses.

“Because, I was in Purgatory for so long,” Nicky explains in old Italian. “Suffering for what I had done to you. Why should I deserve Heaven so quickly?”

Joe cries then, weeps really, trying to hide his tears in the itchy stubble that’s regrowing over his head. Nicky holds Joe then, trying to soothe him, regretting that he spoke because it hurt his beloved so terribly.

“Will you ever forgive me?” Nicky asks distantly, staring at the ceiling as Joe tries to call him back to their life. “Could you?”

His answer is a beatific kiss, drenched in saltwater, tasting sweeter than baptism. “There is nothing to forgive,” Joe whispers into his mouth, their lips pressed together.

When Nicky comes up for air, he is reborn.

* * *

Two weeks after they save him, Nicky looks up from his crossword at the gasp of agony from his beloved.

“Habibi,” Nicky murmurs, reaching out to catch the tear before it can fall from Joe’s perfect eyes. “Limadha tabkin?”

In response, Joe reaches back to him, his fingers brushing over Nicky’s chest where the marks of his torture have lingered for so long; Nicky looks down, frowning through the difficult angle, and watches the pink, scarred skin shift and fold inward, leaving a blank canvas in its wake. 

Venial marks, washed away by Yusuf’s forgiveness; Nicky wonders if his contrition were really so perfect to deserve such a gift.

“Marry me,” Nicky says suddenly, astounded by the gift of forever stretching out before them.

“What?” Joe asks, laughing through his tears, his fingers still tracing over the pale skin as though expecting the marks to reappear.

“Marry me,” Nicky repeats, smiling in full. “Again. Always.”

His answer is a thousand kisses, and somewhere among the flood of Yusuf’s love, Nicolo recognizes it as _yes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops! 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who indulged me as I ended up writing ... a lot more than I thought I would when I started writing this on Sunday. Thank you to everyone who was so kind and encouraging and helpful!!
> 
> Please please let me know what you thought even if it's just a pic of you throwing your computer at me! Also if you think their coda/happy ending needed to be a lot longer than this I would not be averse to just writing 2000 words of porn where they finally get their 35th honeymoon.
> 
> (Google Translate note: When Nicky asks "Limadha tabkin?” towards the end, he's asking "why are you crying" and when Andy says "Im tufshal Nikulas,” to Joe, she's saying "You didn't fail Nicholas")
> 
> (Also also, if you catch a language issue please let me know, I was obviously relying so much on Google Translate!)  
> THANK YOU AGAIN FOR READING


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